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Macron and the Saudis

Justifiable concern about ‘fake news’ is being used by mainstream media outlets to produce fake news. An example that has surfaced in France shows that this new brand of MSM dishonesty is being used to suppress some of the awkward questions that voters should be asking about front-runner Emmanuel Macron in the final round of the Presidential election.

The story begins with a piece of fake news which circulated briefly in France as the first round of the contest heated up.

“Emmanuel Macron, Saudi Arabia's choice of candidate in the French presidential election" declaimed an article that was shared on Twitter on Wednesday March 2 by Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, an MP and niece of Front National candidate Marine Le Pen.

Marion Le Pen wrote on Twitter, "30% of Macron's campaign funded by Saudi Arabia? We demand transparency!" According to the article, published on the site lesoir.info, a wire story from French news agency Agence France-Presse claimed this information came from a tip given by Philippe Close, a leading member of Belgium's socialist party.

However, it was not a simple as that, because the web page she was citing was in fact a very convincing copy of that of the Belgian daily newspaper Le Soir — with a different URL. No such press agency report had ever existed. Philippe Close confirmed that he had never made any such statement. The story was indeed classic ‘fake news’.

Marion Le Pen herself was promptly notified that she had been hoaxed and she deleted the tweet within thirty minutes. But it had already spread to various ‘far-right’ outlets, including one of the main Marine Le Pen twitter feeds.

By the time they also learned of their mistake and deleted the fake report, the damage had been done: The potentially damaging claim that Macron is in the pockets of the fundamentalist Islamic Saudi regime was now labelled ‘fake news’. The Observers site [1] is a typical example.

Not so fast! Take a closer look at the headline

Note the sleight of hand, the left-liberal trick which turns the exposure of a piece of fake news of unknown provenance, which ostensibly could have benefitted the nationalist Le Pen, into a piece of MSM fake news which most definitely benefits the globalist Macron.

Because the original Le Pen tweets were specifically about the claim that Macron had received 30% of his campaign funding from Saudi Arabia. If this had been true, the Presidential front-runner would have broken the law and would be facing impeachment if elected.

As it is not true, no action will be taken against Macron, because he has not broken any funding law. But that has no bearing whatsoever on the quite separate claim that Macron is “the preferred candidate of Saudi Arabia”. Yet, as the headline above illustrates, Team Macron, including the French Communist newspaper Liberation, falsely used the fake claim to ‘debunk’ this far broader allegation – despite the fact that it is in fact extremely well-founded.

Which of course raises the question as to who produced the fake “30% funding” claim? And why? Because the people who benefitted from it are Macron’s campaign managers, who can now shoot down as ‘debunked fake news’ any attempt to point to Macron’s very real connections to the brutal and corrupt Wahhabi dictatorships in the Gulf.

This is hugely important, because it is clear that the only thing that can realistically derail Macron’s presidential bid would be a massive scandal. The revelation that the man ‘destined’ to lead France is on the pockets not just of the Rothschild Bank [2] but also of the corrupt Wahhabi regimes which provided the ideological ‘justification’ for the Bataclan Theatre massacre and every other act of Islamist terror on French soil could provide such a scandal.

Hence the value of the fake news ‘debunking’ of the one snippet of fake news amid all the facts that confirm that Macron is indeed the “preferred candidate” not merely of Saudi Arabia, but of the even more dangerously and openly extreme Qatar.

Emmanuel Macron was Minister of the Economy and Industry between 2014 and 2016. In that role he participated in 2015 in the official state visit (the third in that year) that Prime Minister Valls led to Saudi Arabia. With them there were 200 French entrepreneurs who between them secured contracts for a value of 10 billion euros, selling a variety of high-tech weapons which are now being used in Saudi Arabia’s brutal war in Yemen.

Macron's time at the Ministry of the Economy coincided with a three-fold increase in France’s economic relations with the Saudi monarchy. On Macron’s watch as Minister, a record $ 3.63 billion in arms were sold at the Riyad court. Saudi Arabia is now the biggest single destination for French weapons systems. In 2015 alone, French commercial contracts with Saudi Arabia reached $ 11.5 billion.

The link with the Saudis was symbolically strengthened in March 2016 when President Hollande gave the Legion of Honour to the Honorary Prince and Saudi Arabian Minister Mohammed bin Nayef. Macron met bin Nayef privately during the visit and even accompanied him to the airport. The timing was slightly unfortunate, given that two days after the award was received on 6 March, the seventy-first person that year was beheaded by the Riyadh monarchy.

During the merger between French state-owned arms manufacturer Nexter and German’s KMW, Macron assured French MP Hervé Morin that the moral scruples of the Germans would not prevent the new company selling weapons to the Saudis.

While the “30% funding” fake news trick concentrates on providing a cloak of invisibility for Macron’s close ties with the Saudis, his lucrative links to neighbouring Salafist dictatorship Qatar, also ignored by the liberal mass media, are if anything even stronger.

While still working for the Rothschild bank, Macron was involved in the negotiations to sell French conglomerate Lagardère's publishing group to the Qatar Investment Authority. The QIA is a subsidiary of the sovereign wealth fund of the Qatari Emirate. [3]

The huge deal was one of many for which Macron became well-known – and staggeringly rich. He earned, for example, €2.9m and a nickname — “the Mozart of finance” — for his role advising Nestlé on its $12bn acquisition of part of Pfizer in 2012.

In April 2016, the Qatar ambassador to France spoke enthusiastically about Macron: "A friendly, creative and innovative personality. I met the Minister of Economy during the launch of Qadran, a business cooperation circle between businessmen from Qatar and France. I have found in him a man of vast culture and profound knowledge of the topics dealt with. The future is therefore his and I hope to Minister Macron all the successes in the service of his country and the strengthening of the relations of France with the friendly countries."

“Macron weaves his web ... to the petro-monarchies of the Gulf. On Tuesday night, the Minister of Economy was one of the handpicked guests at the meeting of Qadran in the prestigious Royal Monceau Palace in Paris.

“A small informal club of Franco-Qatari investors and patrons, created last summer to work "to strengthen exchanges and dialogue with French companies and opinion leaders". Among the members of the Qadran, there are heavyweights including: the State of Qatar, the Qatari TV network BeIN Sports, Qatar Airways, PSG, or Vente-privee.com whose founder, Jacques-Antoine Granjon, is a supporter of Macron.” [4]

Writing on Qadran’s website, Omer Acar, President of Qadran, gives us a glimpse of the vast sums involved in this relationship:

“In 2015, trade between France and Qatar reached 2.8 billion euros, an increase of 34% in comparison with 2014. France was the 2nd commercial partner of Qatar in 2015. Through the years the two countries set up significant partnerships and put together their savoir-faire and expertise.

“For several years, France has been one of the top European destinations of Qatari direct investments. This long-term policy demonstrates a strong desire to commit that has been welcomed by the French authorities and companies.

“Qadran results from this assessed dynamism and from our strong belief in the necessity to deepen Franco-Qatari economic ties. Together with business representatives of the Qatari business community in France, we decided to launch a platform for exchanges between the different economic players, to be held in a convivial spirit.

“As an independent association, Qadran will gather politicians, entrepreneurs, economists, experts and intellectuals, from diverse backgrounds willing to reinforce the French and Qatari relationship.”

Of course, money on this scale also intersects with international politics, and hence with the life and death of the innocents who are always the unwitting pawns and ‘collateral damage’ of such machinations.

Following the line of his former boss President Hollande, Emmanuel Macron, besides being committed both to the European Union and to Washington’s continued domination of Europe, is also an avid supporter of ‘regime change’ in Syria:

"I do not agree with those who want to come to terms with him. Bashar al-Assad is a failed politician."

So while Marine Le Pen has consistently been favourable to the secular Assad government and to its Russian backers, Macron prefers the Islamist rebels and their backers in, among other influential states, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia, of course, was the initial founder and main funder both of Al Qaeda and Islamic State, while Qatar’s support has been and remains central to the continuation of the Islamist invasion of Syria

The Financial Times reported that Qatar had funded the Syrian rebellion by at least $1 billion and "as much as $3 billion" over the first two years of the civil war. [5]

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute estimated that Qatar has fueled the war by delivering the more weapons to Syria than any other country. In total, there were over 70 weapons cargo flights into Turkey between April 2012 and March 2013.

Qatar has provided support to rebel groups across the spectrum and has received criticism for not only funding supposedly ‘moderate rebels’ but also the coalition known as the Army of Conquest, which contains al-Qaeda linked groups. [6]

Thus, while Marine Le Pen stands opposed to the Gulf state’s interference and ambitions in Syria, Emmanuel Macron is not only in effect a business partner of Qatar and Saud Arabia, but he is also in complete agreement with their primary foreign policy efforts. Hence it can be perfectly reasonably said that Macron is indeed the “preferred candidate” in both Riyadh and Doha.

France is torn and broken from years of austerity that followed a financial crash provoked by the reckless greed of the international banks. Yet her likely future President is a man who was made a multi-millionaire by his dealings on behalf of the banking house which has for more than two centuries been a byword for ruthless and predatory manipulation of the financial systems of the world. [7]

France is torn and bleeding from years of Islamist terrorism inspired by the Wahhabi extremism exported at vast expense of Saudi Arabia [8] and Qatar [9]. Yet her future likely President is a man who has helped to swing contracts worth billions with those same state-sponsors of terror and who is committed to risking war with Russia on behalf of their bloodstained agenda in Syria and their forgotten but catastrophic war in Yemen.

Little wonder, then, that the mainstream media in France was so quick to seize the chance to provide Macron with some ‘fake news’ public relations insurance in the event of embarrassing Wikileaks. Because that ‘debunked’ tag will help brush under the carpet any vote-losing questions about the liberal elite’s blue-eyed rent-boy being in bed with the bigoted ‘sheikhs’ who created, funded, armed and trained the terrorism which has repeatedly brought death and horror to the streets of Paris.